The Nation; It Depends What the Meaning of 'Liberal' Is

By JOHN MICKLETHWAIT and ADRIAN WOOLDRIDGE

Published: June 27, 2004

LAST week, America witnessed one of the great acts of political fealty. Across the country, liberal Americans lined up to buy copies of ''My Life'' by Bill Clinton. Like his wife's autobiography, ''Living History,'' Mr. Clinton's book has become a sort of literary bumper sticker -- a label of loyalty to the liberal cause, to go on the coffee table alongside those tickets for Michael Moore's ''Fahrenheit 9/11.''

Mr. Clinton certainly qualifies as a liberal icon in two ways: as the first Democratic president to win re-election since Franklin Roosevelt and as a hated figure for the right -- the noninhaling, draft-dodging slick Willie. Yet in most other respects, Mr. Clinton's record belies the liberal tag. He was a fiscal conservative who balanced the books, reined in spending, promoted free trade, oversaw a Wall Street boom, signed a welfare overhaul and supported tough crime policies that many old-style liberals once regarded as barbaric.

At one point, Mr. Clinton famously complained that he had become an Eisenhower Republican. But even that term may be too liberal. Dwight D. Eisenhower argued that a ''gently expanding'' government was part of a civilized society. Mr. Clinton declared ''the end of big government.''

He was never a rigidly ideological figure. Rather he was a malleable pragmatist who wanted the Democratic Party to adjust to a country whose center of gravity was moving to the right. He grew up speaking the language of conservative America. His life-long affair with Christianity began when he was 8. In his autobiography, he confesses that when he watched the riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, he understood how both sides felt, the protesters and the police.

He cut his political teeth fighting a rearguard action against the spread of Republicanism across the South. In one of his first campaigns, working for George McGovern in Texas, he watched the state of Lyndon B. Johnson vote overwhelmingly for Nixon. In 1980, he lost the governorship of Arkansas after his first term because he was regarded as too much a liberal, and he shifted sharply right thereafter. He approved the first executions in his home state since 1964. He so courted business that the A.F.L.-C.I.O. refused to endorse his re-election. And his educational policies had such a conservative bent that William J. Bennett, President Reagan's education secretary, inscribed a book in 1987 to ''the Democrat who makes sense.''

Mr. Clinton came to national attention as the leader of the Democratic Leadership Council, a group that promoted globalization, a muscular foreign policy and a tough stance on social policies; it was widely derided by liberals as Democrats for the Leisure Class. In the 1992 presidential campaign Mr. Clinton attacked the anti-white language of the rapper Sister Souljah, promised a middle class tax cut and returned to Arkansas to preside over the execution of a mentally retarded black man.

What about his record once in the White House? Liberals advance two arguments as to why he was really one of them. The first, which is also a canon of the president's persecutors on the right, is that he tried to be liberal in his first two years in office -- by standing up for gays in the military and promoting a health care plan. This march to the left was stopped, according to the liberal version, only under heavy right-wing assault.

But was the new president really so liberal? The gays-in-the-military controversy is uncharacteristic. Just days after the election, the president-elect was asked whether he would fulfill a campaign promise to let gays serve openly in the military; one of the best wafflers in American politics flatly said, ''Yes, I want to.'' When a political firestorm blew up, he compromised with a ''don't ask, don't tell'' policy.

Rather than being an attempt to nationalize a seventh of the economy, as conservatives claimed, his health care plan had the backing of many large manufacturers and insurers who wanted to curb health costs. In the same first two years, Mr. Clinton also embraced the fiscal conservatism of Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin and championed the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Another argument advanced to bestow liberal credentials on Mr. Clinton is that he forged a progressive presidency by stealth. Lots of little things -- the earned-income tax credit, some environmental measures, general support for multiculturalism -- added up to one big thing: the third way.

Yet the policy of triangulation, which Mr. Clinton followed after 1994, tried to put distance between the president and both the Republicans and the Democrats. Bite-sized conservative policies balanced the bite-sized liberal ones: his support for school uniforms and tough sentencing laws, for example. He not only proposed the Defense of Marriage Act but then his re-election campaign bought 70 spots on Christian radio stations to brag about it.

Richard Nixon, many say, talked like a conservative but governed like a liberal. He liked to quote Disraeli that ''a sound conservative government'' consists of ''Tory men and Whig measures.'' In many ways Mr. Clinton was the opposite, argued a few conservatives, including David Frum, a former speechwriter for President Bush. ''Clinton makes speeches,'' Mr. Frum wrote in The Weekly Standard in 1999. ''Rubin and Greenspan make policy; the Left gets words, the Right gets deeds; and everybody is content.''

Indeed, some small-government advocates, who have criticized federal spending increases under President Bush, look back on Mr. Clinton with some warmth. ''I had my problems with the guy when he was in office,'' said Brink Lindsey, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, ''but I've pinched myself recently when I've found that I've been suffering from Clinton nostalgia. Their policy on trade liberalization, spending control and welfare reform looks pretty good.''

So why the lines in the bookstores in Manhattan, Berkeley and other liberal bastions? The easy answer is that the impeachment battle reunited the Democratic base. When liberals buy ''My Life,'' they see it as blow against Kenneth W. Starr, the Republican impeachment squad and even President Bush.

Mr. Clinton spends a good deal of ''My Life'' complaining about conservative America undermining him. In fact, his enemies have helped solidify his liberal base.

Photo: President Clinton signed the legislation for overhauling welfare in 1996. (Photo by J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press)

John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, who write for The Economist, are the authors of ''The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America.''